The Town That Decided to Send All Its Kids to College

Middle-class children don’t regress as readers during the summer, because they go to the library, do educational activities, take classes - poor children, however, lose between one and two months in reading achievement. Springboard trains teachers for a summer enrichment program, and has now started to help them coach parents to help their children during the school year.

The United States has rising childhood obesity and schools deal with kids who are picky. Through innovative school gardens and kid taste testing food, entrepreneurs across the nation are getting children to eat vegetables at school and love it.

For decades, no one at New Dorp public high school seemed to know how to help low-performing students, and unfortunately, this troubled population made up most of the school, which caters primarily to students from poor and working-class families. Now, New Dorp school district is seeing a huge change in test scores due to the new emphasis on writing skills, which is allowing students greater reading comprehension and ability to receive college acceptance.

In Prince George's County School system, two schools have offered international schools, which have a different curriculum for immigrants new to the USA. This has caused complaints and difficulties with the other students, the after school band program has helped bring the two groups together to socialize and form friendships.

With the prices of solar technology dropping and the opportunity to save drastically on energy usage and costs, businesses and organizations across the country are investing more in solar infrastructure for their buildings and facilities. The Better Buildings Initiative of the US Department of Energy is helping by providing guidance and documenting effective approaches and financing for renewables installations - from hotels, to schools, to big box retail.

An innovative school and architectural endeavor in Denmark offers 16 years of lessons for the increasingly popular personalized learning movement. At the Hellerup School, students check in with their teachers at the beginning of the lesson and then disperse throughout the open-plan building to work where they are most productive. While the school has found the model highly rewarding, in recent years, Hellerup has grappled with how to build more group interactions into the intensely individualized curriculum.

A school in Tel Aviv welcomes immigrant and refugee children with open arms, providing language classes, long school days, extracurricular activities, and more. Members of the community volunteer to tutor and lead after-school courses, allowing children to learn while their parents work late. Now, more schools are popping up in Tel Aviv with similar aspirations.

At Capital City Public Charter School, students are graded based not only on academic skills but also social and emotional skills. The Washington D.C. school has a high graduation rate and college enrollment rate.

Mosaic Development Partners (MDP) seeks to create wealth for the black community in Philadelphia by providing affordable housing and creating opportunities in neighborhoods that are considered risky investments for typical real estate companies. The black-owned company has created housing as well as retail opportunities for minority and women-owned businesses who historically have a harder time accessing capital and loans. The company is mission-driven but operates on a for-profit model, finding economic solutions for systemic problems that have kept black communities from creating generational wealth.

The Nusantra Fund provides financial support directly to community-led projects in Indonesia. The aim is to improve the livelihoods of Indigenous and local people while tackling climate change impacts and protecting biodiversity.